The Foreign Correspondent ns-9

by Alan Furst

  Weisz worked toward the front of the hotel, where a bedsheet nailed to a pair of poles, swaying with the motion of the crowd, said something in Albanian. Up here they were also chanting-Weisz caught the words Zog and Mussolini, but that was about it. At the Crillon entry, a score of porters and bellmen were ranged protectively in front of the door and, as Weisz watched, the flics began to show up, truncheons tapping their legs, ready for action. All across the face of the hotel, guests were looking out, pointing here and there, enjoying the show. Then a window on the top floor opened, a light went on in the room, and a matinee idol, with dashing mustache, leaned out and gave the Zogist salute: hand flattened, palm forward, over the heart. King Zog! From behind the drape, someone reached out, and now the king wore a general’s hat, heavy with gold braid, above his Sulka bathrobe. The crowd cheered, Queen Geraldine appeared at the king’s side, and both waved.

  Now some idiot-anti-Zogist elements in the crowd, Weisz wrote-threw a bottle, which shattered in front of a bellboy, who lost his little cap as he leapt away. Then the king and queen stepped back from the window, and the light went off. Next to Weisz, a bearded giant put his hands beside his mouth and shouted, in French, “That’s right, run away, you little pussy.” This drew a snicker from his tiny girlfriend, and an angry Albanian shout from somewhere in the crowd. On the top floor, another window opened, and a uniformed army officer looked out.

  The police began to advance, barring their truncheons and forcing the crowd back from the front of the hotel. The fighting started almost immediately-surging knots of people in the crowd, others pushing and shoving, trying to get out of the way. “Ah,” said the giant with some satisfaction, “les chevaux.” The horses. The cavalry had arrived, mounted police with long truncheons, advancing down the avenue Gabriel.

  “You don’t like the king?” Weisz said to the giant-he had to get some kind of quote from somebody, jot down a few lines, find a telephone, file the story, and go out for dinner.

  “He doesn’t like anybody,” said the giant’s girlfriend.

  What was he, Weisz wondered. A Communist? Fascist? Anarchist?

  But this he was not to learn.

  Because the next thing he knew, he was on the ground. Someone behind him had hit him in the side of the head, with something, he had no idea what, hit him hard enough to knock him over. Not a good place to be, down here. His vision blurred, a forest of shoes moved away, and a few indignant oaths followed somebody, whoever’d hit him, as the man sliced his way through the crowd.

  “You are bleeding,” said the giant.

  Weisz felt his face, and his hand came away red-maybe he’d cut himself on the sharp edge of a cobblestone-then he started groping around for his glasses. “Here they are.” A hand offered them, one lens cracked, the temple piece gone.

  Somebody put his hands beneath Weisz’s armpits and hauled him to his feet. It was the giant, who said, “We better get out of here.”

  Weisz heard the horses, in a swift walk, advancing toward him. He got a handkerchief from his back pocket and held it to the side of his head, took a step, almost toppled over. Only one eye, he realized, saw properly, the other had everything out of focus. He went down on one knee. Maybe, he thought, I’m hurt.

  The crowd broke around him as it ran away, pursued by the mounted police, swinging their truncheons. Then a tough old Parisian flic appeared at his side-he was now alone on a vast stretch of the place Concorde. “Can you stand up?” the flic said.

  “I think so.”

  “Because, if you can’t, I have to put you in an ambulance.”

  “No, it’s allright. I’m a journalist.”

  “Try and stand.”

  He was very wobbly, but he managed. “Maybe a taxi,” he said.

  “They don’t stick around, when these things happen. How about a cafe?”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea.”

  “See who hit you?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “No idea.”

  The flic shook his head-saw too much of human nature and didn’t like it. “Maybe just for fun. Anyhow, let’s try for the cafe.”

  He held Weisz up on one side and walked him slowly over to the rue de Rivoli, where a tourist cafe had emptied out as soon as the fighting started. Weisz sat down hard, a waiter brought him a glass of water and a bar towel. “You can’t go home like that,” he said.

  Weisz invited Salamone out for dinner the following night-by way of encouraging a friend in difficulties. They met at a little Italian place out in the Thirteenth, the second-best Italian restaurant in Paris-the best owned by a well-known supporter of Mussolini, so there they could not go. “What happened to you?” Salamone said, as Weisz arrived.

  Weisz had gone to his doctor that morning, and now wore a white gauze bandage on the left side of his face, badly scraped by the rough surface of a cobblestone, and a puffy red mark below his temple on the other side. His new glasses would be ready in a day or two. “A street demonstration last night,” he told Salamone. “Somebody hit me.”

  “I’ll say they did. Who was it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No confrontation?”

  “He was behind me, ran away, and I never saw him.”

  “What, somebody followed you? Somebody, ah, we know?”

  “I thought about it all night. With a handkerchief tied around my head.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing else makes sense. People don’t just do that.”

  Salamone’s oath was more in sorrow than in anger. He poured red wine from a large carafe into two straight-sided glasses, then handed Weisz a bread stick. “It can’t go on like this,” he said, an Italian echo of il faut en finir. “And it could have been worse.”

  “Yes,” Weisz said. “I thought about that, too.”

  “What do we do, Carlo?”

  “I don’t know.” He gave Salamone a menu, and opened his own. Cured ham, spring lamb with baby artichokes and potatoes, early greens-from the south of France, he supposed-then figs preserved in syrup.

  “A feast,” Salamone said.

  “That’s what I intended,” Weisz said. “For morale.” He raised his glass, “Salute.”

  Salamone took a second sip. “This isn’t Chianti,” he said. “It’s, maybe, Barolo.”

  “Something very good,” Weisz said.

  They looked over at the proprietor, by the cash register, whose nod and smile acknowledged what he’d done: Enjoy it, boys, I know who you are. Saying thank-you, Weisz and Salamone raised their glasses to him.

  Weisz signaled the waiter and ordered the grand dinners. “Are you managing?” he said to Salamone.

  “More or less. My wife is angry with me-this politics, enough is enough. And she hates the idea of taking charity.”

  “And the girls?”

  “They don’t say much-they’re grown, and they have their own lives. They were in their twenties when we came here in ‘thirty-two, and they’re getting to be more French than Italian.” Salamone paused, then said, “Our pharmacist is gone, by the way. He’s going to take a few months off, as he put it, until things cool down. Also the engineer, a note. He regrets, but goodby.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Not yet, but we’ll lose a few more, before this is over. In time, it could be just Elena, who’s a fighter, and our benefactor, you and me, maybe the lawyer-he’s thinking it over-and our friend from Siena.”

  “Always smiling.”

  “Yes, not much bothers him. He takes it all in stride, Signor Zerba.”

  “Anything about the job, at the gas company?”

  “No, but I may have something else, from another friend, at a warehouse out in Levallois.”

  “Levallois! A long way-does the Metro go out there?”

  “Close enough. You take a bus, or walk, after the last stop.”

  “Can you use the car?”

  “The poor thing, no, I don’t think so. The gasoline is expensive, and th
e tires, well, you know.”

  “Arturo, you can’t work in a warehouse, you’re fifty…what? Three?”

  “Six. But it’s just a checker’s job, crates in and out. A friend of ours pretty much runs the union, so it’s a real offer.”

  The waiter approached with plates bearing slices of brick-colored ham. “Basta,” Salamone said, enough. “Here’s our dinner, so we’ll talk about life and love. Salute, Carlo.”

  They kept work out of it for the duration of the dinner, which was very good, the leg of young lamb roasted with garlic, the early greens fresh and carefully picked over. When they’d finished the figs in syrup, and lit cigarettes to go with their espressos, Salamone said, “I guess the real question is, if we can’t protect ourselves, who is there to protect us? The police-the people at the Prefecture?”

  “Not likely,” Weisz said. “Oh officer, we’re engaged in illegal operations against a neighbor country, and, as they’re attacking us, we’d like you to help us out.”

  “I guess that’s right. It is, technically, illegal.”

  “Technically nothing, it’s illegal, period. The French have laws against everything, then they pick and choose. For the moment we’re tolerated, for political expediency, but I don’t think we qualify for protection. My inspector at the Surete won’t even admit I’m the editor of Liberazione, though he surely knows I am. I’m a friend of the editor, the way he puts it. Very French, that approach.”

  “So, we’re on our own.”

  “We are.”

  “Then how do we fight back? What do we use for weapons?”

  “You don’t mean guns, do you?”

  Salamone shrugged, and his “No” was tentative. “Maybe influence, favors. That too is French.”

  “And what do we do for them in return? They don’t do favors here.”

  “They don’t do favors anywhere.”

  “The inspector at the Surete, as I told you, asked us to publish the real list, from Berlin. Should we do that?”

  “Mannaggia no!”

  “So then,” Weisz said, “what?”

  “How do the English feel about you, lately?”

  “Christ, I’d rather publish the list.”

  “Could be we’re fucked, Carlo.”

  “Could be. What about the next edition? Farewell?”

  “That hurts my heart. But we have to think about it.”

  “Fine,” Weisz said. “We’ll think.”

  After dinner, walking from the Luxembourg Metro to the Hotel Tournon for his evening session with Ferrara, Weisz passed a car, parked facing him, on the rue de Medicis. It was an unusual car for this quarter-it would not have been remarkable over in the Eighth, on the grand boulevards, or up in snooty Passy, but maybe he would have noticed it anyhow. Because it was an Italian car, a champagne-colored Lancia sedan, the aristocrat of the line, with a chauffeur, in proper cap and uniform, sitting stiff and straight behind the wheel.

  In back, a man with carefully brushed silver hair, gleaming with brilliantine, and a thin silver mustache. On the lapels of his gray silk suit, an Order of the Crown of Italy, and a silver Fascist party pin. This was a type of man that Weisz easily recognized: fine manners, scented powder, and a certain supercilious contempt for anyone beneath him in the social order-most of the world. Weisz slowed for a moment, didn’t quite stop, then continued on. This momentary hesitation appeared to interest the silvery man, whose eyes acknowledged his presence, then pointedly looked away, as though Weisz’s existence was of little concern.

  It was almost nine by the time Weisz arrived at Ferrara’s room. They were still working on the colonel’s time in Marseilles, where he’d found a job at a stall in the fish market, where he’d been discovered by a French journalist, then defamed in the Italian fascist press, and where, in time, he’d made contact with a man recruiting for the International Brigades, a month or so after Franco’s military insurrection against the elected government.

  Then, beginning to worry about page count, Weisz took Ferrara back to his 1917 service with the arditi, the elite trench raiders, and the fateful Italian defeat at Caporetto, where the army broke and ran. A national humiliation, which, five years later, was more than a little responsible for the birth of fascism. In the face of poisoned-gas attacks by German and Austro-Hungarian regiments, many Italian soldiers had thrown away their rifles and headed south, shouting, “Andiamo a casa!” We’re going home.

  “But not us,” Ferrara said, his expression dark. “We took the losses, and retreated because we had to, but we never stopped killing them.”

  As Weisz typed, a timid knock at the door.

  “Yes?” Ferrara said.

  The door opened, to admit a seedy little man, who said, in French, “So, how goes the book tonight?”

  Ferrara introduced him as Monsieur Kolb, one of his minders, and the operative who had extracted him from the internment camp. Kolb said he was pleased to meet Weisz, then looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty,” he said, “time for all good authors to be in bed, or out raising hell. It’s the latter we have in mind for you, if you like.”

  “Raising what?” Ferrara said.

  “An English expression. Means to have a good time. We thought you might like to go up to Pigalle, to some disreputable place. Drink, dance, who knows what. You’ve earned it, Mr. Brown says, and you can’t just sit in this hotel.”

  “I’ll go if you will,” Ferrara said to Weisz.

  Weisz was exhausted. He was working at three jobs, and the steady grind was beginning to get to him. Worse, the espresso he’d drunk earlier in the evening had had absolutely no effect on the Barolo he’d shared with Salamone. But their conversation was still on his mind, and an informal chat with one of Mr. Brown’s people might not be a bad idea, better than approaching Mr. Brown himself. “Let’s go,” Weisz said. “He’s right, you can’t just sit here.”

  Kolb had evidently sensed they would agree, and had a taxi idling in front of the hotel.

  Place Pigalle was the heart of it, but the strip of nightclubs, neon-lit, marched up and down the boulevard Clichy, suggesting bountiful sin for every taste. There was plenty of real sin to be had in Paris, in well-known bordellos thoughout the city, whipping rooms, harems with veiled girls in balloon pants, high erotic-instructive Japanese prints on the walls-or low and beastly, but up here it was more the promise of sin, offered to wandering crowds of tourists sprinkled with sailors, thugs, and pimps. Gay Paree. The famous Moulin Rouge and the flipped skirts of its cancan dancers, the La Boheme at Impasse Blanche, Eros, Enfants de la Chance, El Monico, the Romance Bar, and Chez les Nudistes-Kolb’s, and likely Mr. Brown’s, choice for the evening.

  The nudist colony. Which described the women, dressed only in high heels and powdery blue light, but not the men dancing with them, to the slow strains of Momo Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions-according to a sign at the corner of a raised platform. Five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, a tiny violinist, cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, wings of white hair fluffed out above his ears, Rex the drummer, Hoffy on the clarinet, and Momo himself, in a metallic green dinner jacket, astride the piano stool. A weary orchestra, drifting far from their hometown Vienna on the nightclub sea, playing a schmaltz version of “Let’s Fall in Love” as the couples shuffled about in circles, doing whatever dance steps the male patrons could manage.

  Weisz felt like an idiot, Ferrara caught his eye and looked to heaven, what have we done? They were led to a table, and Kolb ordered champagne, the only available beverage, delivered by a waitress dressed in a money pouch on a red sash. “You don’t want no change, do you?” she said.

  “No,” Kolb said, accepting the inevitable. “I suppose not.”

  “Very good,” she answered, her blue behind wobbling as she plodded away.

  “What is she, Greek, you think?” Kolb said.

  “Somewhere down there,” Weisz said. “Maybe Turkish.”

  “Want to try another place?”

&n
bsp; “Do you?” Weisz said to Ferrara.

  “Oh, let’s have this bottle, then we’ll like it better.”

  They had to work at it, the champagne was dreadful, and barely cool, but did in time elevate their spirits, and kept Weisz from falling dead asleep with his head on the table. Momo Tsipler sang a Viennese love song, and that got Kolb talking about Vienna, in the old days, before the Anschluss-the tiny Dollfuss, not five feet tall, the chancellor of Austria until the Nazis killed him in 1934-and the infinitely bizarre personality-high culture, low lovelife-of that city. “All those high-breasted fraus in the pastry shops, noses in the air, proper as the day is long, well, I knew a fellow called Wolfi, a salesman of ladies’ undergarments, and he once told me…”

  Ferrara excused himself and disappeared into the crowd. Kolb went on with his story, for a time, then wound down to silence when the colonel emerged with a dancing partner. Kolb watched them for a moment, then said, “Say this for him, he certainly picked the best.”

  She was. Brassy blond hair in a French roll, a sulky face accented by a heavy lower lip, and a body both lithe and fulsome, which she clearly liked to show off, all of it alive and animated as she danced. The two of them made, in fact, an attractive couple. Momo Tsipler, his fingers walking up and down the keyboard, swiveled around on his piano stool for a better view, then gave them a grand Viennese wink, somewhere well beyond lewd.

  “There is something I want to ask you,” Weisz said.

  Kolb wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be asked-he’d perfectly heard a certain note in Weisz’s voice, he’d heard it before, and always it preceded inquiries that touched on his vocation. “Oh? And what is that?”

  Weisz laid out a condensed version of the OVRA attack on the Liberazione committee. Bottini’s murder, the interrogation of Veronique, Salamone’s lost job, his own experience on the place Concorde.

  Kolb knew exactly what he was talking about. “What is it you want?” he said.

  “Can you help us?”

  “Not me,” Kolb said. “I don’t make decisions like that, you’d have to ask Mr. Brown, and he’d have to ask someone else, and the final answer would be, I expect, no.”